The Butterfly Effect: Space Unicorn
by DrCyrusBortel
Summary: Space Unicorn, soaring through the stars! Join Dr. Star Butterfly, Commander Marco Diaz, and the cast of Star vs. the Forces of Evil as they journey across the Solar System in search of knowledge, adventure and love! AU in more ways than one. Quasi-sequel to The First Space War.
1. Hot Open

This author does not own the Star vs. the Forces of Evil franchise. This story was written for personal amusement.

* * *

 _"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the Joint Government occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."_

 _Senator John F. Kennedy (L, Massachusetts Province), speaking on the successful completion of the Joint Government's first manned Mars surface mission, Tsinghua University, September 1962._

* * *

 **Biological Research Range**

 **Io, Jovian System**

Io (pronounced eye-oh), the innermost of the four big Jovian moons, sits smack bang in the middle of Jupiter's enormous radiation belt. On Io, you can receive a lethal dose of radiation in hours, which will cause you to vomit blood, poop blood, and bleed internally until you die in two weeks or so.

Jupiter's glowing belts of death are charged by Io's many gigantic volcanoes, which pump vast amounts of charged particles deep into space. The volcanism is in turn caused by tidal heating of Io's interior as it travels around Jupiter.

These volcanoes also spew forth gargantuan lava flows, which leave behind yellow, sulfurous rock.

As a result, Io looks like a giant, ugly, rimless pizza.

Close-up, the walkable bits of Io consist of broken, colorful plains of solidified basalts. The airless black sky is dominated by Jupiter. The glowing orb of orange and white stripes that hangs in the sky is two thousand times larger than a full moon.

It is a horrible place to live, and, after Venus, is the second closest thing to the popular conception of hell in the Solar System.

"You know, I think I'm going to move here after I retire! The view of Jupiter from this place is… whoo!"

Dr. Star Butterfly, safe in her magnetically-shielded spacesuit, took in the view from the top of a bright yellow boulder, even as she placed another blue-stained rock sample into a collection tube.

A voice came in on her helmet radio.

"Star, get a move on! Incoming in ninety seconds!"

Star collected another sample.

"Come on, Marco! I'll have plenty of time to work out my retirement plans after we finish teasing out the secrets from little samply-wamply here." Star held the sample tube to her eyes and began coddling it. "Who's a good Io-adapted mutant bacterium? You're a cute radiation-resistant fella, aren't ya? Aren't ya? I just want to stick your genes in something else right this instant!"

"STAR! Get moving! Artillery inbound!"

"Marco! You and the Marines had one job! To let me do my job! But are you doing it? NOOO!"

"STAR! I'm not kidding! Get to cover!"

"Marco, I can hear the chatter as well as you can. Those rounds won't be here for another minute. Isaac Newton is king up here. It's not like they can be early."

"Get to cover!"

"Ughhh…"

Star stowed her sample pack, and stomped off to the foxhole. Marco, clad in another bulky orange suit, yanked her down.

"Okay, I'm down. Are you happy?"

"I'm about to be blown up by scrap metal! Do I look like I'm happy?!"

A marine, clad in a mottled grey hardsuit and powered exoskeleton (and apparently on the same channel), looked quizzically at Marco. Star noted her expression, and turned towards Marco.

"Marco, the marines here make their living out of getting shot at. Could you please show a little more sensitivity?"

"I should be up in CIC, in a comfy couch watching dots on a screen! What the heck am I doing down here?!"

Wet navy warships are not commanded from their bridges (which are mostly just for steering the ship), but are rather controlled from their combat information centers, or CICs, deep in their hulls. Space warships lack bridges altogether.

"Sensitivity, Marco. And I don't think I like your Earther attitude towards this place. It's nice. It's ridiculously dry, but there are plenty of metals and minerals. If you want power, all you have to do is build one of those."

Star pointed upwards towards the giant Powersat Consortium™ electro-dynamic tether, a long, nearly invisible silk-like strand that cut the black sky in half as it stretched towards Jupiter. The tether stole gigawatts of energy from Io's orbital motion as Io pulled it through Jupiter's vast magnetic field, slowing the moon down ever so slightly.

"Star, this place kills you in minutes! It's ridiculous we're fighting over this godforsaken hellhole!"

"Are you crazy? Those tethers are the key to the whole Jovian System! Of course we're fighting over this place! And it was totally ours to begin with!"

"Gah!"

The marine pushed the squabbling pair to the ground. "IMPACT!"

At three kilometers per second, a kilogram of inert matter has kinetic energy roughly equivalent to one kilogram of TNT. As kinetic energy scales quadratically with velocity, the twenty tonnes of shredded steel scrap hurtling towards Io at nine kilometers per second had the kinetic energy of nearly two hundred tonnes of TNT. The thousands of dangerous fragments were nigh-unstoppable with the small aerospace defense lasers the Marines had at their disposal.

A thousand blinding starbursts lit up the craggy landscape, and an odd, sharp rumble rang through the ground. No noise could be transmitted in the super-thin gas that passed for an atmosphere on Io.

Ferguson, safe and sound aboard the JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn (隱形粉紅獨角獸) came in over the comm.

"Rounds have splashed."

No kidding, thought Marco.

"All counter-artillery lasers dead. Hostile tug inbound in two. Friendly dropship's en route. Invisible Pink Unicorn will be rising in twenty."

Marco winced at the name, picked by ultranationalist politicians to spite the Arabian Coalition. The name screamed belligerence and antagonism, and in a Solar System on a knife's edge… it was suboptimal.

It was also girly as heck. Oh, why couldn't he have been given the JGSS Vermicious Knid instead?

The Euros – well, their terroristic proxies in the Jovian System - had timed their attack well. On the part of its Low Io Orbit that took it around the other side of the moon, Marco's frigate had been powerless to intervene as a civilian chem-fuel tug abruptly changed course to bombard the camp – and another began to land at their position.

Bound to its orbit by the laws of physics, JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn would be equally powerless to intervene in the upcoming firefight.

In twenty minutes, however, the frigate's orbital track around Io would carry it above the battlefield. From the perspective of the Marines, the Invisible Pink Unicorn would rise above the horizon like a miniature moon, ready to smite the Marines' enemies with big ultraviolet lasers.

They would have to hold out until then.

Captain Jackie Lynn Thomas, commander of the frigate's Marine platoon, reported in next.

"Sergeant Amberg reports two casualties, both KIA. Civilians secure in slit trenches. All forces fall back to Sergeant Amberg's position. Grab the VIPs."

The marine grabbed the duo, and sprinted off towards the rendezvous point, taking long, low leaps across the terrain. A short distance away, Star caught sight of StarFan13, running to keep up with her marine escort. It was nice to have help on field expeditions like these.

They passed the shredded remains of their camp. Inflatable Kevlar domes lay mangled beyond recognition, their contents scattered hundreds of meters away. The drill-corer had been reduced to a mangled pile of metal. The surface scraper lay on its side. The field laboratory pod had taken a direct hit from a one-dollar piece of scrap metal, destroying millions of dollars worth of scientific equipment in an instant. Star could just make out the logo of the Butterfly Corporation (蝴蝶集團) amongst the twisted aluminium.

Star tried not to cry. What monsters could have such loathing for scientific research? All they had wanted to do was create better strains of radiation-resistant bacterial bio-leachers to extract Io's metal deposits (and maybe pick up a few new patentable genes in the process). The bacteria would greatly simplify exploitation of Io's resources, and hasten settlement of Io. Who could be against that?

Oh, of course. It would hasten Joint Government settlement of Io. The Euros, Japanese, and East African Confederation would definitely be against that.

They stopped at a small crater, covered in blue mineral deposits and surrounded by colored basalts. Star picked up a bent metal spike – one of the original seeders the Butterfly Corporation had dropped from orbit to inoculate a square kilometer of sterile basalt.

Protected from the deadly radiation by the dirt above them, the bacteria had multiplied and spread from their seeders. As the replication process was imperfect, mutant strains of bacteria emerged. Some were more suited to their environment, some less.

The strains most suited to the harsh conditions of Io were able to multiply faster than their less-adapted counterparts, dominating the population. Among their sloppy copies, some would be even better adapted…

…and the cycle would repeat itself until the rugged landscape was filled with mineral-extracting bacteria that were perfectly suited for use on Io, just waiting to be harvested by hyperactive scientists and translated into products & profits by innovative corporations.

A star descended from the night sky, and split into three. The Marines opened fire with shoulder-fired missiles. The tug died, as did one of the inbound drop pods. Countermeasures from the other drop pods (where had the insurgents gotten their hands on those?) allowed them to survive.

The starlets grew into little fuel-filled aluminium balloons, each surrounded by a ring of hardsuited insurgents. Retrorockets burned hard and airbags inflated as the drop pods slammed into the alien landscape two hundred meters from their position.

Star took aim at the nearest pod with her rocket-bullet assault rifle, and opened fire at an insurgent, running unnaturally fast thanks to his powered exoskeleton. The figure collapsed, red droplets spraying from his suit. Figures scattered from the landed pods. The hardsuited figures wore the orange-and-white armbands of the _Front de Protection Jovien_. Jupiter Protection Front.

A marine fired a camera grenade skyward, giving Jackie a clear view of the battlefield on her helmet display.

Jackie screamed orders into her mike. "Automatic on left! Rifles on right! Go, go, go! Keep 'em behind that… ridge thing!" She highlighted a low clump of raised basalt on helmet displays.

Brilliant (i.e. very smart) grenades exploded over enemy positions, lancing enemy troops with explosively formed penetrators (superfast globules of molten metal) from ten meters away.

"Grenades right, grenades right! They're pushing!"

The grenade-machine-gun turned on its tripod, and explosions went off in the distance.

An enemy grenade screamed overhead, and the automatic grenade launcher (and the Marine gunner) exploded in a bolt of hot copper.

"Darnit!" Jackie fell prone, and began shooting. Mindful of enemy camera grenades, she moved every few shots.

A figure tried to run back to the drop pod. Star dropped him. "Guys! They're trying to grab something from the pod!"

Jackie nodded. "Chet, Sabrina, left and right! Watch the pods! Suppress!" She turned to Marco.

"Commander Diaz, move repeatedly! But don't crouch, lie prone! Star shoots straighter than you!"

Marco cursed his rudimentary Space Force weapons training.

The enemy tried to rush their position several times, but failed even as Marine casualties began to mount.

Ferguson came in over the comm. "Rising in one minute, people! Hold on!"

Jackie's eyes went wide! "Darnit! Inbound Banzai charge!"

Ten insurgents – all of the survivors, Star presumed – rushed forward from their positions, hoping to do as much damage as possible before the JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn rose over the horizon and finished the fight with ship-to-ship lasers.

They failed, and died ignominiously under a hail of fire. A new star rose in the sky, and dropped off a smaller star to meet the exhausted marines.

A few hidden missiles tried to shoot down the lander as it hurtled back to orbit, but they were out of the frying pan at last.


	2. Invisible Pink Unicorn

**Lander One**

 **In orbit around Io, moon of Jupiter**

"Lander One, this is JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn. You are clear to dock at bay one. We will begin chasing the insurgent tug immediately upon docking, so brace yourselves."

Marco stared out the tiny window, and sighed with relief as a ship – _his_ ship – came into view.

The JGSS (Joint Government Space Ship) Invisible Pink Unicorn was an Azure Dragon (Qinglong青龍)-class "frigate". That is, it was a medium-sized _multi-purpose_ warship, which traded ship-to-ship armament and armor for dropships, orbit-to-surface munitions, marines, and boarding craft. It also had provisions for a removable multi-purpose module, which at this moment was housing a mobile biological research laboratory, owned and operated by the Butterfly Corporation.

Space warships had grown substantially since the first space war of 1984. Thirty meters in diameter, and a hundred meters – thirty stories - from top to bottom, the frigate was the same size as the crude nuclear pulse battleships that had been the largest warships of that primitive era. Like those ships, the JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn was segmented, modular, and armed to the teeth.

Like most high-acceleration-capable ships, the JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn was laid out like an office tower. At the base of the spacecraft was the fusion torch. A hollow hemispherical cage of magnetic coils, open at the bottom, the fusion torch only barely contained the thermonuclear inferno that thrust the ship upwards.

Above it was an armored octagonal prism, containing water propellant tanks, missile pods, and habitat modules. Stubby point-defense laser turrets studded the prism, and seams of replaceable modules or missile pods were clearly visible.

Capping the vessel was a truncated pyramid, with four chamfered (squared-off) edges and four triangular faces, housing the ship's phased-array radars and particle-beam cannon. It was hoped that the steeply sloped armor the pyramid shape offered would improve survivability in a head-to-head space battle.

At the neck of the ship, where the chamfered edges of the pyramid met the faces of the prism, armored turrets sprouted from raised podiums. The two turrets mounting the ship's railguns were low, and sported thick, boxy barrels. The other two turrets were big, bulky cubes that protruded far from the body of the ship. Those housed the ship's ultraviolet ship-to-ship lasers. Each pair of weapons, mounted on opposite sides of the ship, had near-complete coverage of the sky.

Marco could not help but compare the general shape of his ship to the general shape of an Apollo Command and Service Module – the spacecraft that had brought Man to the moon so very long ago. If the Apollo CSM had had a sharper nose, octagonal cross section, and more bits and pieces sticking out…

Jackie looked out the window, and chuckled. "Hey guys! Who put the dunce cap on the monkey head?"

A marine responded to the crack. "Whoever it was, he was too lazy to finish the neck."

Chuckles spread throughout the cabin.

Star looked out the window. "Oh yeah, the ship does have big ears. And check out the proboscis on that long face!"

Marco rolled his eyes. "Those "ears" can vaporize a scooter from a thousand klicks off. And that "proboscis" fires guided slugs at nine kilometers per second."

Jackie put her hand on Marco's shoulder. "Relax, Commander Diaz. You run a good ship. We jarheads trust you to fly us anywhere without getting us killed. Isn't that right boys?!"

"Ooo-rah!" Nine voices rang out in unison. Not so long ago, it would have been fourteen.

"See?"

Marco smiled, and nodded.

The ship loomed large in the window, and Marco could just make out the disembodied unicorn's head on the pyramidal nose, just above the anterior railgun. "JGSF", "綜合政府星軍", "JOINTGOV", and "綜合政府" were printed all over the hull in large friendly letters, leaving no questions as to the allegiance of the vessel.

The indigo racing stripes, Space-Force-Grey paint job, and indigo helium-atom flag (the "ring and thing") also helped.

A large square door just below the anterior railgun, marked "MARINES" and "陸戰隊", swung downward, and the boxy lander slid into the hangar. The door – covered with the same armor tiles that protected the whole ship - swung shut.

"Lander one docked. All hands brace for acceleration."

In the ship's fusion torch flared to life, and the ship began accelerating "upwards". Marco felt the sensation of weight return to his body, and Star's long hair, previously floating in mid-air, fell back to her shoulders.

A ship that is being accelerated upwards by a rocket engine must force its contents upwards as well. As such, the decks of the ship will exert an upwards force on the ship's crew and cargo. The crew experience this force as a downwards reaction force, commonly called "thrust gravity", which gently (or roughly) presses the crew to the decks of the ship. The means torchships have true "ups" and "downs", directions which are meaningless in microgravity. Anterior, posterior, port, and starboard are defined arbitrarily, in a plane perpendicular to up or down.

Marco walked posteriorly down a short corridor, climbed up a flight of stairs, and headed starboard into the ship's combat information center. Huffing and puffing, Star followed him into CIC. The red lighting which preserved the crew's night vision gave the windowless octagonal room an eerie feel. The heavily reclined acceleration couches made the room feel like a gaming center.

"Commander on deck!"

"Thank you, Lieutenant Ferguson." He strapped into his crash couch, which tilted upward. Star did the same, and sighed with relief. The ship was accelerating at military thrust - nearly a full Earth gravity, six times the lunar gravity she had grown up in.

"We are underway, Commander Diaz. The insurgent tug is twenty-five thousand kilometers away, and running on fumes. It'll be a while before we catch up, though."

"Is everybody strapped in?"

"Aye, aye, sir. We're at battle stations."

"Military thrust! Give me three gees, Ferguson."

Star gulped.

"Aye, sir."

The ship shook a little, and Star felt like she was carrying a car on her chest. A sensor tech spoke.

"Sir, we've got a bogey. The _Asashio_ just lit her torch. She'll intercept us in fifteen minutes."

So the Japanese were getting in the ring. This day was just getting better and better.

"Janna, what are we looking at?"

Lieutenant Janna Ordonia, shipboard Intelligence & Security officer, hollered. " _Kasumi_ -class destroyer. Medium-sized UV lasers, big spinal mount railgun. Fewer missiles. Less armor, less countermeasures. We're pretty evenly matched, but they can outrun us. Sir, may I remind you that we have standing orders not to cause a ruckus?"

Star yelled out. "I say we kick their war-criminal-worshipping cans!"

Star noticed faint nods from the Asian-Pacifican, Lunan-Pacifican, and Martian-Pacifican members of the bridge crew – including Janna. Marco pretended to ignore them.

"We back off if they demand it. An automated insurgent tug isn't worth starting a war with the Japanese. Star, while our foes, today's Japanese are not personally responsible for the unethical actions of their ancestors. Keep your incendiary comments to yourself, or I will kick you out of CIC."

Star wanted to cross her arms and sulk, but the acceleration had made them too heavy.

"Sir, text transmission from _Asashio_. They… want us to submit to a boarding inspection."

"What?!"

Janna pulled the message on screen, and began reading. "Attention JGSS Renying Fenhong Dujiaoshou（隱形粉紅獨角獸）. That's us, sir. We have reason to believe that people on-board your ship may have murdered citizens of the European Union, and request that you match orbits to allow us to board and inspect your ship. If you do not comply, we will open fire."

Janna looked at Marco quizzically. "Why the heck would they try to create an incident without a clear advantage in firepower?"

Marco gritted his teeth. "Get Rear Admiral Skullnick on the line!"

An ageing, heavyset woman with a floating crop of red hair appeared on-screen. "What the heck have you gotten us into this time, Marco?"

"Ma'am, a Japanese destroyer is burning towards us. They want to board us, and can outrun us. We have sensitive equipment and personnel on board, and cannot be boarded. They'll be in weapons range in ten minutes. What do we do?!"

Even at the speed of light, a laser-comm message would take more than forty minutes to reach Earth, and at least another forty minutes would pass before the reply arrived at Jupiter. Out here, Skullnick was queen – as were the commanders of the various other space forces around the Outer Planets.

This made the scattered engagements (and "warm" quasi-war) very easy to shrug off by the governments of Earth as the actions of "rogue elements" or as "misunderstandings".

"Cavalry's coming. Run away and don't let them board you. Shoot down boarding pods. Do not shoot down the _Asashio_ unless they shoot first. Stay out of weapons range for as long as possible."

Marco nodded.

"Alfonzo, you heard the Admiral. Get us out of here! Stay out of enemy weapons range for as long as possible, and burn towards the relief force."

The sensor tech spoke. "JGSS Liaoning, JGSS Chicxulub, JGSS Changsha, JGSS Atlanta, and JGSS Calgary just lit their torches. Designate Battlegroup Chicxulub. At our new vector, our boys will meet us in… four hours."

Marco's eyes went wide. The Liaoning was a cruiser, which had been expected… but the Chicxulub was a battleship. Skullnick was massing a lot of kaboom for a show-of-force.

While old science-fiction movies had depicted interplanetary travel as near-instantaneous, the reality is that space is mind-bogglingly enormous. Io, the nearest of Jupiter's four big moons, is as far from Jupiter as the Moon is from Earth – 400,000 kilometers, thirty times earth's 13,000-km diameter. The other big moons are between one-and-a-half and five times further from Jupiter than Io.

Jupiter also has scores of moonlets – mostly asteroids captured by Jupiter's gravity. The most distant among them are more than fifty times further away from Jupiter than Io.

The mere hours-long travel times are a testament to the power of the torch drive.

Janna spoke up. "Oh boy. We've really kicked a hornet's nest this time. Drives are lighting up across the Jovian System. We've got an EU Battlegroup on our tail. They'll intercept an hour after our boys. Ahhh… the Japanese are scrambling from high orbit. EAC squadron's also deploying… Oh, we're responding in kind. Koreans and Vietnamese are moving to form up with Battlegroup Florida."

"Sir, the _Asashio_ is burning. They've got an acceleration advantage over us. They'll be in weapons range before we can form up with Battlegroup Chicxulub."

Janna raised her wrist. "Sir, what should we do with that tug?"

"Kill it. One Gila should do it."

A squat, chubby missile was kicked from its tube. It turned toward the target, started up its motor, and hurled itself towards the tug at ridiculous speeds. A short while later, the motor cut out, the missile burst into smaller missiles, and it continued on its way.

It would intercept in half an hour or so.

Janna turned back to her monitor. Her voice was flat. " _Asashio_ says: cease burning immediately or we will open fire. Inform your fleet to cease burning towards us."

"They're giving chase!"

Marco narrowed his eyes. "Ferguson, sound depressurization alarms and don helmets. We might have to fight our way out of this one. "

 _*Chicxulub Crater is an eroded crater in Mexico. It is believed that the 10-15-kilometer wide meteorite that created it caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least one class of Joint Government battleships appear to be named for such cataclysmic events. Considering that a battleship (or cruiser, for that matter) possesses enough nuclear weaponry to end terrestrial civilization, this does not seem inappropriate._

 _**the story of the First Space War of 1984 is told in the crossover fanfiction "The First Space War", which can be found on my main page._


	3. Warm War, or, A Regrettable Incident

**JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn**

 **In orbit around Jupiter**

Now merely ten thousand kilometers away, the _Asashio_ loomed large on Janna's screen. While the resolution was suboptimal, the tall, dagger-shaped spacecraft was still clearly recognizable as Japanese. Unlike JOINTGOV, the Japanese Space Defense Force eschewed segmented, modular designs in favor of monolithic designs.

The gleaming white paint job and giant Rising Sun mural (complete with belligerent red rays) were also pretty distinctive.

There is little point in trying to stealth up a spaceship with a fusion torch that glows with the power of a trillion light bulbs.

The tall, steep-sided pyramid of a warship wasted precious mass on support for its upper levels, but the steeply sloped armor provided superior protection in the head-to-head battles for which the _Asashio_ had been optimized – especially given the relatively thin armor the ship otherwise possessed. The tall spire also allowed the _Asashio_ to sport a massive spinal-mount railgun, which could kick guided projectiles to nearly twenty kilometers per second – nearly as fast as a missile.

Janna felt the torch drive cut out, and the gravity momentarily reversed as the Invisible Pink Unicorn spun around to face the _Asashio_ head-to-head. She choked back vomit. It would not do to throw up inside her space helmet. Weightlessness was banished as the drive spun back to life.

"And we are jinking." The torch gently burnt on and off to wiggle and spin the ship to minimize harm from laser shots.

"Depressurize the ship." Alarms blared and faded to nothingness as air was sucked into storage tanks.

" _Asashio_ cut out at 9000 klicks. It's jinking. Boarding pod incoming."

"Warning shot, defocused laser. Warm up that pod."

"Aye, sir." A gigajoule of light hit the (empty) boarding pod, raising temperatures inside significantly.

"Sir, they're painting us with fire control radar and defocused laser shots."

"Return the favor." Marco's voice was firm and measured.

A message popped up on Janna's screen. "Uh… guys, they want us to leave their pod alone."

"Tell them to stop closing, and turn back."

"Zombie, zombie, zombie! Enemy railgun rounds, anterior and posterior! They'll miss by a fifty klicks."

Zombie was the brevity code for enemy shell.

"Four warning shots, port and starboard, ant and post." Four thumps reverberated through the hull.

Janna and Ferguson's screens lit up like Christmas trees. "Holy cow! A Korean destroyer just fired on a Japanese cruiser in high orbit! Oh, hell. JGSS Jabberwock is moving in to assist." Janna wished the Invisible Pink Unicorn's sister ship luck.

"Vampire, Vampire, Vampire! Sixty contacts, closing fast! Music is on!"

"Lasers are trying to get us!"

"Firing back!"

"Jinking hard!" Black streaks – shallow scorch marks – swept across the top hulls of both ships as lasers were ineffectually fired from extreme range, never lingering long enough to burn a hole in the modest armor.

"Vampires just broke into submunitions! Three thousand bogeys, closing fast! Five minutes to impact!"

This was a real fight, then. "Swing around, five gee burn to starboard!"

The ship maneuvered, and the torch lit. From the perspective of the missiles (and Asashi), the ship moved laterally away, forcing the missiles to expend propellant as they gave chase.

Marco checked his math. "Missiles away!" Clangs reverberated through the ship as its missile bays emptied.

"Missiles boosted. Lasers free."

The _Asashio_ lit its torch, and turned to follow.

The big lasers began to sweep dozens of projectiles from the sky as the projectiles entered effective laser range. Star pulled up a tactical display. According to the computer, at current rates, a substantial number of enemy projectiles were expected to survive.

Crossover. The two opposing missile swarms clashed, and hundreds of missiles exploded as they collided at velocities that made plane crashes look like romantic kisses.

Ferguson's voice emerged through her helmet speakers. "Zombie, zombie, zombie! Enemy railgun's busy! Five… nine… fifteen… Oh boy, they're rocket-assisted projectiles. They'll hit at the same time as their missiles…"

Star watched as the dots inched across the display.

Marco double-checked his math. "Swing to face enemy! Ready particle beam! Fire countermissiles!"

The room spun around her, and the deck rumbled and clicked as the railguns spewed guided anti-missiles in full automatic mode.

"Fire particle beam! Kill those missiles!"

A lance of particles moving at a hair under the speed of light stabbed into the darkness. Electrons were stripped from atoms as they smashed into the unarmored Japanese missiles, creating electromagnetic disturbances that fried their electronics. Other missiles were destroyed by guided railgun rounds, which spread umbrella-shaped nets to increase their chances of hitting enemy missiles.

Star stared at the far wall of the command center, mindful that a giant particle accelerator the length of the ship lay behind it.

On Star's display, the figures shifted in favor of Invisible Pink Unicorn. The surviving missiles burst into clouds of tungsten darts.

"Alfonzo, get us moving!" Tungsten darts can't follow ships.

Point-defense lasers discharged, knocking hundreds of darts off-course.

A few hit the Invisible Pink Unicorn head-on, punching deep, clean holes through the forward armor to wreck the compartments beneath. At the speeds they were going, 1-kilogram darts had the destructive power of 100-kg TNT bombs. An unsettling clang reverberated through the CIC.

Marco maintained his composure. "Damage assessment!"

"We're alive, sir! We lost upper tank 1, and the starboard phased array is gone. The posterior railgun is inoperable. Particle beam made it! Who'd have guessed?"

Star raised an eyebrow. She too had expected the long chain of coils to be the first thing to break in a battle.

"We've still got inbound zombies! Killing 'em! Man, those things are fast!"

Star checked in on the _Asashio_. The destroyer had been hit by more than a dozen darts, and scars marked where the deposited energy had been blown into space.

"Sir, no torch from _Asashio_. She may be dead in the water."

"Laser her sector by sector. If she can move, she'll have to."

The deck rumbled again, and Star watched as bright flares lit the stricken destroyer's hull. Meters of sloped armor and internal decks were vaporized in seconds by ultraviolet lasers.

In a battlefield with powerful lasers, a still target is a dead target.

Marco winced as yet another laser beam cut into the unmoving hull. "Cease fire. Ask for their surrender. Use all bands so their suit radios will pick it up."

The CIC crew watched the screen intently.

"Nobody's picking up, sir."

Janna looked jubilant. "Can the Marines board _Asashio_? We could really use more intelligence on Japanese warships."

Marco considered the idea, and then discarded it. Star caught a hint of worry in his voice. "No. The Japanese probably have the place wired to blow. Jackie and the Marines won't make it."

Janna frowned. "Jackie might have a better idea on that one. I'll ring her up."

Before Marco could protest, Janna had Jackie on the channel. "Hey, Captain Thomas! It's Lieutenant Ordonia. Yeah, great news! That Nipponese destroyer we've been shooting at – we nailed the bastards! They're dead in the water, and we've been lasering them like fish in a barrel. Are your Marines up for a boarding action? The Commander's worried about thermonuclear self destruct switches."

Jackie's voice was confident. "You got it, Janna. We'll need thirty to plan and kit, but braving nuclear immolation is our job. There ain't nobody better at it!"

Marco frowned, and looked somewhat uncomfortable. "I'm not so sure about this. What if they're playing possum?"

Ferguson spoke up. "I can laser them sector by sector to disable all external weaponry. Once we pull up alongside, the particle beam can fry anyone inside without scratching the paint job… too badly."

Janna's lips curled downward. "At that range, the electronics on those ships are going to be toast. We'll never get anything useful out of them. No particle beams unless the Marines get into real trouble."

Alfonzo plotted a course on the computer. "Should we match vectors and pull up two thousand klicks lateral to her?"

Marco tugged at his helmet. Janna tilted her head. "Duty, victory, and promotions, Marco. It's what we signed up for. Plus, I already cleared it with Admiral Skullnick. We hold the ship until they get here with a prize crew."

Marco gulped, and nodded. "Here we go."


	4. Asashio

**Japanese destroyer** ** _Asashio_**

 **Jovian Orbit**

The _Asashio_ and JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn, while still within the circles traced out by Jupiter's moons, were not technically in an orbit around Jupiter. During the chase, their torch drives had accelerated them well over Jupiter's escape velocity, putting them on a hyperbolic trajectory that would take them far from Jupiter. In fact, both ships were going fast enough to leave the Solar System entirely.

Nonetheless, they had matched velocities, and from their individual perspectives, were as motionless as the Earth beneath our feet.

Of course, the Earth is spinning on its axis and hurtling around the sun.

The Invisible Pink Unicorn pointed its heavily armored pyramidal head towards the _Asashio's_ vulnerable flank like a dagger to a neck. Well, if the dagger was thirty stories tall, and a thousand kilometers away from the neck.

Feeds from drones suggested that all was quiet aboard the Asashio. Most of the ship's crew were dead – fried by reflected energy from gigawatt-range lasers or liquefied by kinetic energy weapons as they blasted through the hull. Men and women just like those aboard Invisible Pink Unicorn lay splattered across rooms, char-grilled, riddled with shrapnel, their frozen remains a testament to the horrors of technological warfare.

"Huh. The flyboys sure did a number on the crew. I would not want to be on the receiving end of that."

Clad in an armored digital-camouflage hardsuit, Captain Jackie Lynn Thomas, Joint Government Marines, surveyed the carnage with typical sangfroid. Her point marine signaled the all-clear, and she pushed off the lander, floating into the hallway. She turned towards her platoon. "1st squad on me! We're pushing to CIC! 2nd squad, engineering! 3rd squad, find damage control! Remember, once we secure those, we sweep the corridors! Ship may look dead, but they're compartmentalized for a reason. Stay sharp! Prepare for booby-traps and defenders!"

They arrived at CIC. Sabrina threw a flash grenade into the enemy CIC, and charged into the room. Flashes of gunfire told of survivors. Combat in vacuum is noiseless, since air is needed to transmit sound.

Jackie, leading from the front, entered the room, and shot a retreating spacesuited Japanese in the back. His lifeless body continued to travel forward, and hit the lip of the opposite door. Three marines gave chase. Jackie looked around the wrecked room.

The scene was one of utter carnage. A wall of _Asashio_ 's CIC emptied into a wreckage-filled void, and the room looked like a tornado had passed through it. Three other fresh, bullet-ridden bodies floated in the middle of the room.

* * *

"Bad news. It doesn't look like any terminals survived this."

On the (surprising still) marine helmet cam footage, a hardsuited Jackie smoothly glided through the air like a manatee through water. Or a mermaid, thought Marco.

He shook his head, and returned to the main display, showing the _Asashio._ At the first sign of trouble, Alfonzo would rip the enemy apart with lasers and particle beam. His laser was also accurate enough to fire on any resistance the Marines faced. The Marines would have to take cover too, of course, and friendly fire was always a danger.

Marco anxiously turned back to Jackie's screen, where a corridor firefight was in progress.

Star opened a private channel. "Marco? Marco! Focus on your job. Watch the Japanese ship, not the firefight. If you want your crush to come back for you to crush on, do your job properly."

"Crush? What crush? I'm not crushing on Jackie Lynn Thomas." Marco sighed happily as he said her name.

"Uhh… Marco? You told me you had a crush on Jackie. Remember? Back when we were monitoring that brine well on Europa?"

Star was grateful that the ship was still depressurized, and therefore air-free. Their conversation could not be heard through the vacuum, and this _encrypted_ channel was _private_.

Next to her, Lieutenant Janna Ordonia, shipboard Intelligence and Security Officer, idly listened to Marco's private channel as she checked her commander's channel for treasonous activities. She heard nothing of the sort, but continued to listen in anyway – even as she began analyzing the videos of Asashio's CIC.

On the marine camera, three dead Japanese charged forward, their momentum carrying them forward in weightlessness even after their demise. The spacesuited cadavers became riddled with stray bullets as the brutal close-quarters firefight continued. Marco looked somewhat sick, and Star rolled her eyes. Typical freefall close-quarters battle, nothing to get worked up over.

"Marco Ubaldo Diaz!"

"Gah! Star!"

"Marco Diaz! You are a professional soldier. Not a schoolboy. Act professionally, in the interests of my science team, your crew, and our government. Not yourself. Don't think I didn't hear your tone when you said that boarding the ship was too dangerous. Eyes on your screen."

Marco's eyes drifted back to the marine helmet cam, where the firefight was still in progress.

Star groaned. This was why units had been sex-segregated for the century following the Taiping Rebellion of 1850. That Charlie Foxtrot of a civil war had claimed thirty million lives – a higher death toll than World War I. It had also kick-started the mass conscription of women for frontline combat duties in the Joint Government Armed Forces.

Modern man was supposed to be better than this! Star tried another approach.

"What would Jackie think if she knew you weren't doing your job properly, hmmmmm?"

Marco finally returned his attention to his screen, and Star sighed with relief. Her timing had been impeccable.

Jackie came on the channel. "Invisible Pink Unicorn, we need fire support near engineering. Marking now." An icon appeared on the screen. Marco gave his assent.

Ferguson complied. "Take cover."

"Under cover."

"Fire in the hole."

A laser drilled through the enemy hull, five intervening bulkheads, and emerged from the other side. In the targeted compartment, the fraction of energy reflected off bulkheads was sufficient to blast its occupants to shreds, as if a bomb had gone off within the compartment. Ferguson fired five shots.

"Laser off. You may advance."

"Darnit, two casualties! Someone get coolant and a medic!" Even glancing reflections could redirect huge amounts of energy, making the definition of "under cover" unpredictable.

Marco remembered something, and turned to Janna. "Uh, Janna? How's the situation elsewhere?"

Janna didn't look up from her display. "Nothing we need to worry about, Commander. Battlegroup Chicxulub is still en route, and they'll still beat the Euros to us. They'll relieve us until a tug can come along to take our prize home."

"And Jabberwock?"

"JGSS Jabberwock died with the Korean destroyer. The _Chokai_ – the Japanese cruiser outclassed them by a significant margin. Not unexpected."

Marco gritted his teeth.

"What was the point of sending a frigate to go toe-to-toe with a cruiser?"

Janna finally looked up from her screen. "I'd wager it was political. Show the Koreans our resolve. Back them up even in futile battles. Friends to the end stuff."

Marco scrolled through his tactical display.

"Any more shooting matches shaping up in-system?"

"No sir. Earth came back with orders to stand down… a half hour too late."

Marco grimaced. This meant that the decision to stand down had been made by both governments before the ships died. Light, that sluggard, had taken forty minutes to reach Jupiter from Earth with the message.

Janna waved her arm. "Relax, Marco. You've got a VIP and lots of expensive lab equipment onboard. We're not going to be thrown to the wolves like JGSS Jabberwock."

Jackie's voice came over the channel. "We have engineering, CIC, and damage control. Uh… what's left of them. Ship's ours!"

* * *

 _*Note that ships can often be operated (and scuttling nukes detonated) from engineering, CIC, or damage control. The ability to board Asashio is therefore contingent on these three places being knocked out beforehand. Boarding an enemy spacecraft that is not a complete wreck is near-impossible. Point-defenses perform exceedingly well against slow landers, maneuvering fusion torches emit large amounts of radiation, and against Marines (instead of a dozen shell-shocked weapons techs), door-to-door fighting in a three-dimensional industrial maze will result in very high casualties._


	5. After-Action Review

**JGSS Chicxulub**

 **High Jovian Orbit**

Rear Admiral Margaret Skullnick, Commander in Chief, Jovian Fleet, was a tall, heavyset, imposing figure. Her regulation-length hair stood on end in microgravity, adding a full ten centimeters to her considerable height. Her cabin on the JGSS Chicxulub was spartan even by Space Force standards, the Rear Admiral having declined to personalize the various screens and smart-walls.

Commander Marco Ubaldo Diaz floated at attention, his feet firmly anchored to the magnetic strip on the floor, as Skullnick continued her tirade.

"…do you have any idea how much is at stake here? Twenty million of your fellow Pacificans live in the Jovian System, in fragile bubbles of rock, metal, ice and air. Out here, a single shot to a major life support subsystem means a slow death for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Joint Government citizens! Decades of effort to bring Civilization to the Outer System down the drain! Billions of dollars of capital, labor, and stock values – gone! We are not seeking war, Commander Diaz, is that clear?"

Marco stiffly nodded, his face impassive. "Yes, admiral. I understand."

Admiral Skullnick paused, and broke into a wide grin. "Okay, that'll do for the politicians if they want to make nice with the barbarians. Excellent work, Commander Diaz! You handled your ship well, and won a toe-to-toe battle with a Japanese destroyer. You were pressing your luck a little by boarding that ship, but you knew an intelligence and propaganda coup when you saw one, didn't you, Commander?" Skullnick raised an eyebrow.

Marco grinned faintly, and nodded slowly, all the while wondering if enemy peace offerings were equally insincere.

Noting Marco's obvious discomfort, the Admiral floated closer, and patted his shoulder. "Relax, Diaz. The Japanese and Euros started this. You did nothing wrong. Like I said, we have too much blood and treasure riding on the Outer System to want a war out here. The Euros, Japanese, and East Afros, on the other hand – they don't have much to lose in the Outer System except Saturn's Helium-three. Keeping us tied up out here with a warm war helps them win the cold one on Earth."

Marco pinched his chin as he tried to evaluate the costs of the terrestrial cold war, proxy wars and all. Skullnick smiled.

"Thoughtful as always, Commander Diaz. You'll fit in perfectly with the other doctrine-writing eggheads at Warfare Development Command once you've punched your card out here."

Marco's ears turned red.

Skullnick chuckled. "You know, when Admiral Wong forced you on my fleet, I was pretty mad. You were obviously out here to sweeten up your service record, and babysitting that corporate science team – with some CEO's daughter onboard to boot - was pretty much the safest job imaginable out here. Plus, a Commander at your age – definitely a fast-tracker for staff work."

Marco gulped once, and frowned.

"Relax, Diaz. You're a good commander, and I'm actually going to miss you when you leave for another theater – or go back to Xi'an to write doctrine."

Much to his own surprise, Marco maintained his expression of displeasure. "Admiral, while I am not qualified to assess her work, my impression has been that Dr. Butterfly is a highly competent scientist leading a valuable, profitable research team. She is also my good friend."

Skullnick nodded, her expression inscrutable. "Of course, Commander Diaz. I stand corrected. And I like people who stand up for their friends."

Marco attempted to decipher Skullnick's even tone. Was she irritated that Diaz had challenged her? Had Marco caused her to lose face? Or did she really mean what she said?

"You should return to your ship, Commander Diaz. Tug's almost here. We'll escort your ship and _Asashio_ upwell in case the Euros or Japanese get any funny ideas."

Marco nodded, saluted, and left the room.

 _What did I just say?_

* * *

 _*Yes, this author is aware that the US military maintains a variety of time-in-grade requirements. The Joint Government Armed Forces may or may not do so._

 _Consider that Marco Diaz, a Commander (equivalent to a Marine Lieutenant Colonel) is roughly the same age as Jackie Lynn Thomas, a competent Marine Captain, two pay grades down. Diaz has obviously been over-promoted. One may also speculate at the politicking behind the scenes._

* * *

 **Fleet Base Himalia, Himalia**

 **High Jovian Orbit**

The largest of Jupiter's distant, irregular moons, Himalia is a large, icy, tarry former asteroid. If placed on the Earth's surface, its 60-kilometer-tall bulk would cover the Province of Connecticut. Himalia, like nearly all asteroids, has negligible surface gravity.

It had nonetheless escaped exploitation in the first wave of settlement of Jupiter. Point Teller, a more agreeably located and much smaller moonlet, had been the focus of activity in High Jovian Orbit since the first manned nuclear-bomb-powered Nuclear Pulse Vehicles thundered into orbit in 1975.

Subsequently, however, the Joint Government had felt it prudent to stake a claim to the several quadrillion tonnes of valuable ice and tar the moonlet represented. A few tax breaks, contract bids, fleet visits, and government-backed international legal battles later, the moonlet was the proud property of the Long River Consortium, who immediately leased chunks to a variety of other corporations – mostly Pacifican, Korean, and Vietnamese. Claim-cementing settlement had followed soon after, with the construction of a pair of 3-mile-long habitat cylinders in the moon's meager orbit to house a starter population of 25,000 – nearly all Pacificans.

As such, most of the construction around Himalia was relatively new, tidy, and somewhat lacking in character.

Marco Diaz and Star Butterfly floated into Fleet Base Himalia's food court. Breakfast for Green Shift had just concluded, and dinner for Red Shift had yet to begin, so the food court was mostly empty. They made a beeline for the Stop 'n' Slurp.

Marco tapped his implant on the counter. "I'll have a Pearl Milk Tea, please."

Star, her long hair floating ridiculously tall in the microgravity, mulled over the drinks selection, and tapped the counter. "I'll have a Red Bean Milkshake. Fractionated, please."

The machine went to work, and Star smiled at the familiar whir of the centrifuge. Two sealed, transparent, juice-pack-like bags, one red-and-white, one khaki, popped out of the machine, and slid onto the counter. Star and Marco grabbed their respective drinks, and floated over to the window.

Marco exhaled sharply. "Man, I never get tired of this view."

Star shrugged. "Eh. Seen one cageworks, seen 'em all."

Himalia's negligible gravity means that ships docking at the Himalia Shipyards, the only shipyards in the Outer System capable of producing torch-drive-equipped ships, can "dock" directly on the surface of the asteroid. The same is true of ships docking at Fleet Base Himalia, which is co-located with the shipyards.

Upon the black, frozen dirt (regolith) of the asteroid were huge, wiry cages, each easily a hundred stories tall. Along the latticework of steel trusses were moving dots – all manner of construction and repair "cherry-pickers", flitting along rails as they went about repairing the cages...

…and the enormous ships within. The dozen or so blocky warships, so out of place amongst the delicate cageworks, jutted from the asteroid like giant church towers or cathedral spires. Near the horizon (not very far away on the tiny moonlet), larger, bulkier cargo ships, tankers, and liners lay docked in similar cages.

Marco's eyes were instinctively drawn to one ship, parked some distance from the main field – and the eye-catching thirty-storey-tall Rising Sun mural painted on its side.

Star followed Marco's gaze, and took a closer look at the battered, pitted, ship. "So, how'd it go with the Rear Admiral?"

"Skullnick fake-chewed me out for raising tensions with the Japanese, and patted me on the back for nabbing _Asashio_."

In the distance, a glow overtook a medium-sized cargo container as a beam of plasma pushed against the invisible fields of its magnetic sail, sending the cargo container hurtling towards its destination.

Marco sighed. "Star… you've met Skullnick. Do you think she really hates people who talk back to her?"

"Marco, she's your boss, Marco. I only met her once or twice. I thought you said it went well. What happened?"

"Well… she said something about you being unqualified, and I kinda… tried to defend your reputation." Marco hesitated to clarify the admiral's remark, hoping not to upset Star.

"Aww… that's so sweet of you, Marco."

They hugged.

Star reluctantly let go.

"But you really don't need to stick up for me professionally, you know. My data and results speak for themselves. Spirit of science and all that. Otherwise it just devolves into finger-pointing and ad hominem attacks. Obviously, nobody's obligated to take you seriously if you have no qualifications and no proof that you know your subject matter well, and in practice these principles are not adhered to as well as they should be, but still…"

Star began to ramble. Marco put his hand on her shoulder. "Star. I know. This was personal, not professional."

"Thanks, Marco. You're a good friend."

Star scratched the back of her neck. "I'm sorry I was so harsh on you during the boarding action. I was still pretty freaked out by the close shave with the Asashio, and when it looked like you were distracted… I kinda tossed my empathy out the window. You know… if it had been me on that monitor, I'm pretty sure you would have been glued to it too."

"Star, every word you yelled at me over the comm was the truth. Even if it had been you on-screen, being distracted wouldn't have helped you one bit. It would just have put everyone in danger."

Star shook her head. "But what I said was… a little brutal. You can't help how you feel."

"Star. We were being shot at, and I was daydreaming on the job. War is brutal, what was going on was time-critical, and I needed sense knocked into me fast. Thank you for that."

Star nodded. She wanted to broach the idea of requesting a new Marine detachment, but held her tongue. She could afford to get distracted about as little as Marco.

Marco tilted his head. "You were freaked out by the engagement, huh?"

Star raised her arms, and pointed at her head. "In the lab, this girl is queen! On the ground, this girl was trained by the best mercenaries in the Solar System to shoot a rifle, take cover, crawl, and throw grenades. Among other things."

Star looked around, and her voice dropped to a flat, theatrical whisper. "I can totally kill you with my bare hands."

Marco rolled his eyes. "Please. If corporate security is so good, what the heck did your company need the Space Force for?"

"Space Force has nukes. Butterfly Security Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Butterfly Corporation, was denied permission to stockpile and employ nuclear weaponry by stupid Earther bureaucrats."

Star's exuberance faded. "But on a ship, strapped to an acceleration couch… I can do nothing but watch bad dots on a screen take their best shot at blowing up good dots on a screen. And waiting for hours before an impending engagement that the laws of physics dictate will occur… it's just as bad as waiting for an exam, except that if you answer incorrectly, you die, and you aren't allowed to do your own paper. I know you well enough to think you'll do it right, but still…"

Star had an epiphany. "Oh, so that's how my parents felt on those Higher Ed Exam days. Never really understood why they said they had worse shakes than I did."

Marco shuddered in sympathy, remembering the grueling months spent preparing for the once-a-year public exams that would significantly affect his future prospects – and the nail-biting hours in the various examination halls. If he had just been a little less careful…

It was Marco's turn. "And it's worse when the guy doing the paper is distracted, huh?"

Star nodded. Marco inhaled sharply, and nodded back.

"Star, my problem probably isn't going to go away immediately, and I'm not confident enough to tell you that it'll never happen again. But I'll learn from my experiences, and I'll do my best. Until then…"

Star tilted her head, and smiled. "I'll always be around to yell at you, and if I'm not, it's not my problem anymore, isn't it?"

They both chuckled, and hugged again, ignoring the curious stares from the men and women of Red Shift as they began to filter into the food court.

* * *

 _This concludes the first "episode" of Space Unicorn. Additional episodes to follow._


	6. The Road To Hell

**Navy Submarine JGS Trilobite**

 **Subsurface Ocean, Europa**

Like on Io, and to a lesser extent on Ganymede, powerful tides stretched and released Europa as it whirled around Jupiter. The tides had created great stress cracks in the brittle, icy skin of the moon, giving it the appearance of a badly scratched ball of white marble.

The heat released by the tidal kneading had also bequeathed Europa a great, briny ocean, a hundred kilometers deep, ten times deeper than the deepest trenches of Earth.

Similar hydrospheres – for the word "ocean" was far too puny for these shells of water – existed on many of the Outer System's icy moons, most famously on Ganymede, Titan and Enceladus. The depth of the hydrospheres and their icy coverings varied from moon to moon. On Ganymede and Titan, the hydrospheres lay under icy crusts more than a hundred kilometers thick – thicker than the rocky crust of Earth.

On Europa and Enceladus, however, the oceans lay much closer to the surface – ten kilometers instead of a hundred. This rendered them accessible to human exploration, commerce… and war.

The JGS Trilobite was optimized for speed, deep diving, and stealth. As such, it had the familiar cigar shape of classical terrestrial submarines, lacking only the sail (often inaccurately referred to as the conning tower). The sail was designed to give submarines a place with enough height above the waterline to mount a hatch that wouldn't let water in. In the Europan hydrosphere, which had an icy roof in place of a surface, such a feature would be completely useless.

All this meant that JGS Trilobite looked like a very large torpedo, as did its quarry, a European submarine arbitrarily designated Tango-One.

In a full-blown shooting war, the JGS Trilobite would blow Tango-One out of the water with a torpedo (or, more likely, with one of the JGS Trilobite's underwater drones).

However, 'uneasy peace' was the word of the day, and Commander Maurice Wan knew it. JGS Trilobite would not be shooting off anything more dangerous than sonar pings – the undersea warfare equivalent of taunts.

"Helmsman, give me five knots. Close to one hundred meters. When we ping their butts, I want those Euros to know we had them dead to rights."

The sonar operator, watching the output from the hydrophones, whispered into his microphone. "The computer says Tango-One is ascending."

The navigator nodded. "The Euros have an active sonar station here. They may turn it on to check their subs."

"Give me a hiding spot, navigator."

Differences in water salinity and temperature significantly affect the propagation of sound through water, masking sound signatures and sonar returns or making their interpretation extremely difficult. This was true in the North Atlantic, and was true in the Europan hydrosphere, dotted as it was with gargantuan plumes of heat ascending from Europa's icy mantle, sinking currents of very salty fluid squeezed from the crust above, and everything in between.

The Joint Government Navy, of course, always had the best hydrographic maps.

The navigator replied. "Turn forty-two degrees to port. Descend three hundred meters at an angle of thirty degrees."

"Navigator, we must maintain contact with Tango-One."

The navigator sighed. "This trajectory comes with an increased risk of detection. Turn five degrees to port and ascend five hundred meters at an angle of sixty degrees."

"Take us up, helmsman."

The sub began rising at a steady pace. The sonar operator whispered in the microphone, his voice thick with alarm. "Active pings, active pings!"

The JGS Trilobite's sound-absorbent hull was very good, but far from perfect. The whole crew of the Trilobite tensed as they awaited the enemy's next move.

The sonar operator sighed with relief as fresh data flowed onto his screen. "Drone searches! Missed us by miles!"

Commander Wan nodded. "How far off are we from Tango-One?"

"Four hundred meters, sir."

"Close to one hundred, and ping."

They did precisely that, and the sonar station promptly lit up as it desperately sought out the intruder.

"Are we recording?" While probably not set for peak performance, the sonar pulses were valuable electronic intelligence, the collection of which was one of the objectives of these Psychological Warfare operations.

"Affirmative, sir."

"Helmsman, bring us to the ceiling." The cluttered sonar returns from the icy ceiling would greatly increase the effectiveness of the JGS Trilobite's stealth coatings, making the submarine that much more difficult to find.

Tango-One joined the hunt with active sonar pulses, and formations of drones joined the search, but the meager returns from JGS Trilobite were soon subsumed by random noise as the submarine slinked back into the vast expanses of the Europan Ocean.

* * *

 **JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn**

 **In low orbit around Europa**

Jackie looked at herself in the mirror. Shorts, check. Long-sleeved t-shirt, check. Clamshell necklace, check.

She stopped. Large, high-quality seashells - impossible to print, and not generally produced by shellfish farms - were relatively valuable off Earth (mostly as a result of a slick marketing campaign). Seashells weren't as valuable as jade or opal, formed by water-dependent geological processes more-or-less unique to Earth…

But would it be enough to draw pickpockets?

Jackie's handheld rang, and Janna's voice came in over the line.

"Jackie, suit up! Diaz wants a squad down with the science team!"

"At a city like Iceberg Valley? Doesn't the lab down there have its own security? My boys were really looking forward to shore leave."

"Diaz doesn't trust the lab's security enough, and doesn't want to ask the local garrison for a detail. He wants your Marines on the job, and he's dragging me down there with you. He says he'll let you rotate your platoon take shifts, so that everyone gets shore leave."

Jackie sighed. Janna didn't notice.

"Also, there's a situation down there I've been ordered to manage, and I need jarheads."

Jackie headed for her equipment locker.

"Oh, I almost forgot. Light gear only. No exoskeletons, no hardsuits. Diaz doesn't want to freak everyone out."

"Janna, Jupiter'll cook us alive if we have to go outside without mag-suits"

"The lab's buried below kilometers of ice, Jackie. Going outside is the last thing that could possibly happen to you."

There was a pregnant pause. "You might get a little wet, though."

* * *

 **Lander One**

 **Descending to Bingshan Gu (** **冰山谷** **, Iceberg Valley), Europa**

"Lander One, this is Iceberg Valley actual, you are clear to land in silo one-six, over."

The pilot acknowledged, and Star looked out the window at the white, glittering moon below. The pristine terrain below, nearly unblemished by the craters that littered the ancient surfaces of Luna and Callisto, told of a young surface under constantly renewal by geological processes.

"Lander One, this is Iceberg Valley actual. Prepare for transition."

"Copy that, Iceberg Valley, we will cut out in five, four, three, two, one. Cut. And we're under your mini-mag. Dosimeters green."

The lander slipped under the city's artificial mini-magnetosphere, which protected surface excursion personnel from Jupiter's radiation belts.

Most personnel still opted for the additional protection provided by a magnetically shielded hardsuit.

Star inhaled sharply as the surface of Europa soundlessly came up to meet them. The rabbits' warren of tunnels, rooms, and gargantuan caverns that made up the city of Iceberg Valley had been built on the edge of a country-sized patch of chaos terrain, a type of Europan terrain so named for its resemblance to a broken mess when viewed from orbit.

Star was seeing it up-close. Out the window were enormous blocky crags of ice, jammed against each other like icebergs in a frozen sea, each threatening to smash the rapidly descending lander into oblivion.

The lander descended into a deep silo, burned rocket motors, and landed gently onto a pad. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have arrived at Iceberg Valley. The habitat temperature is between zero and ten degrees, and the humidity is sixty percent. Welcome to Europa."

* * *

 _The thickness of Europa's ice remains uncertain, although the evidence for a thick-ice model (10-30km) is strongest._

 _We will learn more when NASA's Europa Clipper arrives at the moon in the 2020s._

* * *

 **Funicular Line Subway Car**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

Marco closed his eyes as the funicular railway car hurtled down the steeply inclined tunnel.

They had been descending for over two minutes at incredible speed. Outside, widely-spaced lights illuminated the icy walls, flashing by the windows at a dizzying rate.

"Dizzy" precisely described Marco's predicament. He grabbed onto a handhold, and tried not to trip into a woman holding a briefcase.

Star's laughter wasn't exactly helping. "You know, this funicular gets me super pumped every single time I visit Tom's lab! It's almost like a reentry!"

The half-full (by local standards) car's other occupants – nearly all Han Pacificans in jumpsuits - glanced furtively at Marco's party from two feet away, trying their best to avoid eye contact with a battledress-clad marine.

Jackie was equally impressed with the mass transit. "Wow. This is pretty much the deepest underground I've ever been. I bet this place could take an asteroid drop."

Janna put her hand on Jackie's shoulder. "I bet a rock drop would cause the tunnels to collapse, entombing the occupants in rubble until they died of frostbite and thirst."

Irritated glances swung their way.

Starfan13, eager to please, whooped loudly. "We're almost three klicks below the surface. Europa has the best mineshafts in the System! Enceladus' gravity is too low for you to feel that you're going down, and the crusts of the other moons are too thick for anything but boreholes."

Janna raised her eyebrows, and her voice took on an unsettling tone. "You know, the Norse version of hell was supposed to be freezing. And we're going down… down… down… into the depths of an icy moon"

A woman stood up, and, bobbing and weaving amongst the car's occupants, headed for the accordion connector.

Marco turned somewhat green, and reached for a barf bag. People began discreetly backing away at the sight. The train began decelerating, and an announcement rang out in Mandarin and then Suzhou dialect. An announcement in English followed.

"Arriving at Melt Lens. Doors will open on the left. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform."

"Finally. We're here."

Star chuckled. "Silly Marco. This is just the melt lens. The ocean is ten kilometers down."

The car emptied, and began accelerating downwards once more. Jackie was intrigued. "Why do they have a stop here?"

Star smiled. "Chaos terrain forms when a plume of heat from Europa's core creates a big underground lake of brine in the middle of the ice crust. The lake can't support the surface above it, so it buckles into a weird mishmash of hills that look like icebergs! This stop's for the big underground lake of brine."

Janna looked at her handheld. "Brine mining is a pretty big industry here. They've got a deuterium extraction plant, a tritium breeder, electrolysis plants, ammonia refineries, magnesium refining, and more."

Star spoke excitedly. "Don't forget the aquaculture farms filled with cute, delicious, gut-bacteria-eating tube worms!"

Starfan13 squealed. "Our magnum opus!"

Four voices rang out in unison. "What?"

Star smugly crossed her arms. "The Butterfly Corporation adapted tube worms and their bacterial symbiotes for the brine about… five years back. Complete success! A little sulfated water, a little waste heat from the reactors, and voila! Shellfish! That's how I first met Tom, actually. Pretty cool, huh?"

"I thought you guys were attached to Butterfly's biomining division."

"The bacterial symbiotes were right up our alley."

The car ground to a halt, and the party stepped out.


	7. Prince of Hell

**Europa Oceanic Research Center**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

A tall, spindly, fair-skinned man – the very physique that defined a sun-deprived, city-dwelling spacer - strode into the metal-clad hallway, eager to greet his visitors. He opened his arms in anticipation of a hug. Star took a step back and extended her hand. Tom shook it warmly.

"Tom! How's the public sector?"

"Pretty good, Star. Better hours, yelling at grad students, and I get to do blue-sky research. So, do you want to start with the specimen lab, or the live ones?"

"Oh, come on, Tom, you know me!"

"Live ones it is then! This'll be awesome." Tom turned his attention to Starfan13 and Francis. "Dr. Fung. Dr. Smithington. I presume your work is proceeding well?"

Francis pushed his glasses further up his nose, and began to speak (through his nose, apparently). "It has been… very exciting, the recent instability in the Jovians notwithstanding."

Tom chuckled, and turned to Marco. "You must be Star's military escort. Where are my manners? I'm Dr. Tom Lucitor, head of the bioengineering lab here at EORC."

Marco shook the hand of the tall, spindly man, and pointed at his visitor ID, acquired following a vigorous and thorough security check. "Commander Marco Diaz. I'm the commanding officer of JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn. This is Captain Thomas, Joint Government Marines. This is my intelligence officer, Lieutenant Ordonia. And these are Captain Thomas's marines."

Jackie nodded. "Zheng, Huang, Mok, and Backintosh."

Tom turned to greet the four Marine infantrymen, taking care to shake each of their hands.

Marco turned to Starfan13, his voice a whisper. "What's the deal with Tom and Star?"

"Ex-boyfriend. Tom has a minor anger management problem, but he's a nice enough guy. Does good work."

Francis was less impressed. "His specialty is coaxing funding from sponsors at gala events, but even I must concede that he possesses considerable talent for administration."

Tom said something funny, and the Marines laughed. He clapped his hands theatrically.

"Okay, everyone! This way for the tour!"

* * *

"And this… is the glass-bottomed room. Please stand on the vent – it'll clean your shoes."

Marco looked down. Below a two-meter thick crystal floor, floodlights illuminated a yawning abyss a hundred kilometers deep, filled with water under immense pressure from the weight of the crust above.

Even in one-eighth of a full gravity, ten kilometers of ice was impressively weighty.

The glass curved upwards at the end of the room, morphing seamlessly into a crystal wall. Marco craned his neck. More floodlights illuminated a vast ceiling of ice and rock that stretched as far as the eye could see.

Here and there, Marco saw signs of man's toehold on this forbidding domain. Spindly masts, squat habitat cylinders, and brambles of industrial infrastructure hung from the icy sky like metal stalactites, while pipes and wires dangled from the ceiling and vanished into the darkness.

Janna's whisper echoed through the darkened chamber. "Davy Jones's locker."

Tom waved the party forward. "Feel free to stand on it. The glass is scratch-resistant."

Janna took an experimental hop on the glass. "A hundred klicks of water. Who knows what's down there?"

Tom chuckled. "Unusual forms of ice and some hydrothermal vents, actually. We've sent down expeditions. That's a docking mast for submersibles." He pointed at a slim inverted mast, from which protruded spherical, ovoid, and oblong objects.

Marco spotted a few similar masts in the distance.

"Are those subs over there yours too?"

Tom shook his head. "No. They're Navy."

Marco did a double-take, and turned to Janna.

Janna shrugged. "The wet Navy runs a sub squadron out of here." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "We think the Japanese and Euros have a few subs of their own."

Marco pinched his chin. "Europa has what, three million people?"

Tom raised his finger, but Janna beat him to the answer. "Two million, nearly all Pacificans, half in Iceberg Valley. The Japanese and Euros have a joint colony of fifty thousand, and the UN administers another colony of similar size." She frowned. "Two million's chump change, but it's apparently enough people to justify the expense of a navy."

Tom shrugged. "Regardless, if you ever see the commander of the flotilla out here, give her my thanks. Those thermonuclear depth charge exercises really helped out our oceanographers."

* * *

The party walked into an industrial workspace, filled with a short row of thick pressure cylinders feeding into a processing machine. Tom turned on a monitor, displaying what looked like an endless string of kelp vanishing into the oceans below.

Given the eternal darkness of the hydrosphere of Europa, it was obviously not kelp.

"For decades, man has struggled with the problem of exploiting the vast mineral riches of Europa's oceans. The brine melt lenses are valuable resources on their own, but the volumes of material they contain are relatively small."

Janna tilted her head. "Thousands of cubic kilometers…"

Tom continued. "…is peanuts compared to what's in the hydrospheres of Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and Ganymede. If we could profitably extract even a fraction of the material in those briny hydrospheres…"

Star nodded. "…we'd be set."

Tom pressed a button, and a porthole in the cylinders opened, revealing a slowly ascending string of the not-kelp being fed into a grinder above.

"Thanks to generous grants from the Joint Government Bureau of Development…" Tom turned to Star "…and prior research by the Butterfly Corporation, we have developed a complex chemoautotrophic organism that can endure the rigors of the Europan Ocean. It grows relatively quickly, collects nitrogen, phosphorus, and other dissolved minerals, and is simple to harvest – as this setup aptly demonstrates."

He opened a trunk, and a pungent odor - floor cleaner, rotten egg, sewer, and compost – overcame the group. Marco, Janna and the Marines covered their noses. The scientists leaned in closer to inspect the material.

"Cool, huh?"

Star jumped four feet in the air, and continued to hop upon landing. "Tom… this is awesome! We totally need samples. This is public domain, right? Publicly funded, so we can overlay our stuff on your architecture without paying royalties?"

Tom nodded.

Star shook Tom by the shoulders. "Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh! I knew you'd done it, but I never knew you had production worked out too! Starfan13, take pictures of the setup! Get an industrial process engineer on the line."

Smithington looked closely at the setup. "What's the scaffold for?"

Tom smiled. "Observant. That's the support and biological control mechanism. The organisms are dependent on a few key synthetic nucleic acids they cannot produce themselves. The nucleic acids are impregnated onto the scaffold, forcing the organisms to remain on the scaffold for harvest and stopping them from growing out of control in the Europan hydrosphere."

Star smiled. "Oldest trick in the book. Smithington, any obvious roadblocks to kitting Tom's bad boys out for biomining?"

"The roadblocks are never obvious."

Star tilted her head.

Smithington chuckled. "Adding basic metal-binding proteins should be easy. But you're talking overlaying entire biochemical pathways for biomining, and it'll be a lot of work to assess feasibility."

Star nodded. "A couple of years of preliminary work to evaluate feasibility. A decade or more to do the actual modifying, testing, experimentation, tweaking… and you remember how hard it is to get the cute little reef-builders to hold on to their mineral nuggets, so it might not work. This is going to be difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating."

Star whooped. "Which is short for THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!"

Tom wrapped his arm around Star. "I knew you'd love it!"

Unseen by all except Janna, Marco's eyes narrowed.

* * *

 _Francis Smithington is the rotund, glasses-wearing adolescent with braces in Echo Creek High._

 _Sabrina Backintosh is the accident-prone cheerleader in Echo Creek High._


	8. Hot Pot

**Seaview Seafood Restaurant (** **海景海鮮酒家** **)**

 **Europa Oceanic Research Center**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

In a Chinese hot pot meal, diners (or servers) drop rice noodles, meat strips, meatballs, fishballs, turnips, and various other raw foods into a boiling pot of stock, placed in the center of the dining table, until they are cooked. At that point, the diners choose and ladle food items into their bowls at their discretion, and eat at their leisure.

Hot pots are somewhat more difficult to set up in low gravity. Boiling water splashes further, and food items tend not to remain still. Shrouds become necessary, and tongs replace porous ladles.

Chopsticks are, as ever, reliable.

Marco wiped his safety glasses clean of soup, dipped another shrimp into soy sauce, and placed it in his mouth. He looked across to Star's table, where an animated, jargon-laden discussion was in progress between the scientists and engineers. He tried to follow, but the natural din of a restaurant obliterated all but a few words.

Jackie tapped his shoulder. "Relax, Marco. We're good. Sabrina's got the table covered, and Mok'll relieve her when she needs to eat." She pointed at the ceiling. "Do you wanna go up top later when Fireteam C gets here? I hear the city's got some really good clubs."

Marco nodded. "I hear this place has a pretty vibrant shopping district."

Jackie nodded. "We can go after. But I want to leave some time for skateboarding."

Janna poked his back. "Never thought you'd actually go to a club, Commander. Didn't seem like the type."

Sergeant Mok interrupted Marco's attempt at a glare.

"Lieutenant Ordonia, that server over there's new. And he's a Japanese expat."

Janna stood, and walked over to Tom. "Did you ask the servers?" Mok nodded. "Excellent work, Sergeant."

Marco groaned at the flagrant profiling, and stood to follow Janna.

Janna tapped Tom's shoulder. "Dr. Lucitor, please check your valuables."

A look of surprise overcame him. "My handheld's gone. Must have left it in my office."

Janna began running towards the server. He bolted for the front door.

Jackie and Mok gave chase. "Diaz, Zheng, Sabrina, stay here! Give the police the details!"

"But I can totally help! I've got a Red Belt in karate!"

Jackie smiled. "Knife to a gunfight, karate boy!"

Marco threw his hands in the air, shrugged, and called the police.

* * *

The server bounded over a table (not difficult in 1/8th Earth gravity), pushed off the ceiling, and hit the ground running.

Janna, Jackie and Mok followed, the Sergeant giving the diners an apologetic salute as he sailed over their noodles. The server ran through the entrance, pushed the ticket machine to the ground, and leapt over the mass of people waiting to be seated.

Sergeant Mok tripped over the ticket machine and hit the floor. Janna drew her sidearm, and fired a shot at the ceiling. Pandemonium instantly filled the thoroughfare as hundreds of terrified citizens variously scattered, ducked, and dove for the floor.

Janna cursed. She had expected more people to hit the deck, and fewer to run.

Well, that was what you got for ignoring the training manual.

"Space Force! Hit the deck, people!"

Nothing happened.

Janna cursed again, louder this time. She finally spotted the server – now some distance away - and gave chase, shooting more holes in the foam insulation of the ceiling as she went.

She figured that people would drop to the ground if they were close enough to the gunfire.

Jackie pulled out a skateboard from a waist-mounted pack, unfolded it, dropped it to the ground, and began picking up speed.

Janna looked on incredulously as Jackie overtook her. "You keep your skateboard on your BDU?"

"I corral, you net! Comms on!"

Janna waved the Sergeant to her, and they bolted down another thoroughfare.

* * *

Jackie swerved left to avoid a golf cart, swerved right to avoid a large flowerbed, and flew off a tastefully-designed ramp-shaped rest bench. Onlookers pointed and glared, and a few store managers reached for phones.

Jackie was gaining on the white-shirted man, and they both knew it. The man looked around, and ducked into a narrow, crowded side corridor, where Jackie's skateboard would be unable to maneuver.

Jackie pursued, and leapt onto one of the metal safety bumpers that hugged the walls. She rode the bumper superbly, knocking a few pedestrians over in the process. The rail terminated, and she spotted her quarry. She aimed the board for his torso and sailed off the rail…

…too far. Unaccustomed to the low gravity, she missed the server and plowed into a watch store, landing on her chin amidst a pair of startled customers.

"Thanks for the assist, Jackie. We see him! Heading for the research center!"

Jackie nursed her bruised chin, and began running.

* * *

The man ducked into a side hallway marked "Harriet Ma Memorial Library" and leapt past the electronic gates, which broke into a chain of alarms in response. The librarian popped out to investigate, and was met by the sight of Janna and Mok practically flying across the room.

A heavy book flew along an alley between two shelves, and Janna ducked. It struck the librarian in the face. Janna winced sympathetically. The book might have weighed less on Europa, but it had the same mass as a book on Earth… so it would have hit just as hard.

She emerged into a study area, where rows of cubicles housed rows of studying students – probably from blue shift, Janna remarked. She jumped atop the separators, spotted the server, and jumped across the room. She took one alley of books, and Mok took another.

The shelf collapsed on her without warning, and Janna found herself buried under an avalanche of dated journals.

She thrashed about in the darkness as the half-full shelf crushed her chest. She felt the shelf lighten, and pushed hard.

Mok – and a few students – were waiting, and pulled her to her feet. Jackie joined them.

"You okay, Lieutenant?"

Janna thanked Europa's low gravity once more, and nodded. "Yep. But we lost the bastard."

Marco came in on the comm. "Guys, it's okay. Police have cameras all over the station. We'll find our spy."

Janna frowned. "Might have been an assassin, Marco."

"Assassins don't steal phones when the mark's still breathing, Janna. Unless they spiked the food! Janna, we may need to go to the hospital!"

Janna rolled her eyes.

"I, for one, would welcome a trip to the hospital." Jackie clutched her chin once more, and hoped that it wasn't broken. "What was on the handheld?"

Star pitched in, her voice flippant. "No state secrets, lots of personal info. Schedules, photos, that sort of thing. Tom's work is on academic nets shared with every government in the system. Oh, and Tom denies the presence of anything blackmail-worthy." There was a pause. "He's wiping his handheld remotely now. He's got a backup on his implant, so everything's going to be okay."

* * *

 _Space colonies run on a three-shift system; restaurants, stores, businesses, and libraries run around-the-clock, serving (and employing) different shifts. There's no point in everyone sticking to the same day schedule when the only lights are artificial ones, and having everything run continuously is elegantly economical and deliciously efficient. At any given moment, (roughly) one-third of the population is at work, one-third of the population is off-shift, and one-third of the population is asleep._


	9. Is Mystery

**Europa Oceanic Research Center**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

"Okay. Everything you need to set up a new variant should be on this drive."

Tom handed a small, black, ruggedized hard drive over to Star, who slipped it into her pocket.

"Nice. You'll have a Butterfly Corporation research team here by the end of the year."

Tom's face fell. "I thought you were hoping to head up this one."

Star sighed. "Well… I'm kinda busy right now. Lots of projects across the system need attention, and it's three months from here to Neptune… point is, I can't stay. Maybe I'll follow up a couple years down the road. Anyway, is this place set up for secure networks? That stuff really cuts into the budget."

Tom sighed at Star's blatant attempt to change the subject.

"Yeah, we're set up. These servers and supercomputers are off-network and air-gapped, and we're set up for courier services. You saw the security on the way in."

Star nodded. "Adequate as always. Where can we can set up?"

"There's an empty lab hole in the new wing. Your team can pay to share my farm, or build a whole new aquaculture module at the shipyard. Takes three months."

Star nodded. "Cool, cool."

Tom sighed again, and checked his watch. _Might as well enjoy Star's company while she's here._ "Wow. We finished early. Do you want to spend more time checking out the organisms up close?"

"Totally! Diving suits rule!"

* * *

Jackie sat down next to Janna, who, stretched out on a sofa, was staring intently at the rollout screen of her laptop.

"How's it going, Janna Banana?"

Janna didn't look up. "Poorly. I'm sifting through the information Tom had on his handheld, and I still can't see what the thief wanted. It's all personal."

"Maybe Dr. Lucitor left something out?"

"I snuck spyware in during the file transfer. The guy gave me everything." Jackie raised an eyebrow.

"Maybe the guy just wanted the handheld."

"Who steals handhelds anymore? And check this out."

Jackie looked closely at the magnified image of the Japanese server in a sleeveless undershirt.

"Holy crap! That's a Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces tattoo. How the heck did the restaurant owner miss that?"

"The guy doesn't usually wear sleeveless shirts. Not that the system has seen much of our mystery man. He walks through the campus occasionally, but otherwise sticks to the restaurant corridor. The guy's obviously an amateur. Any half-decent intelligence agency would have removed that tat, and gotten the guy a better cover."

"Shouldn't a guy who isn't in the system get flagged immediately?"

Janna looked at Jackie like she was crazy. "Security isn't omnipotent. We can't spy on everyone 24/7. Just flagged individuals, and just at chokepoints like train stations and intersections."

Jackie didn't respond. Janna continued. "The craziest part is this. After we lose him, the guy wanders through the campus and then just vanishes from the city security system. It's ridiculous. It's not like the guy can walk through walls."

"Maybe Security here really is dropping the ball." Jackie chuckled as she remembered the little show-of-force she and her Marines had put on for Janna in front of the staff of the local Security branch office.

"Nah. Hackers can screw with the facial recognition, but not with the video. I checked. There's no way out of the campus that doesn't pass through a camera."

"Don't you have something that lets you vanish from our own cameras?"

"Duh. But we checked, and they didn't use it. Plus, even if the Euros or Japanese had stolen that particular worm, they wouldn't burn it to steal a handheld."

"Burn?"

"Software like that is use-once-only. They use it, we find out, we change the back door, and they lose it for future operations. No, they'd burn it in an actual hot war, probably to smuggle in suitcase nukes or something."

"So… what are they after?"

"It wasn't Tom's handheld. His handheld was a means to an end. But all his work was public domain. What could they possibly want from…?" Janna had a brainwave, and began working her laptop furiously. "Darnit. The manifest for the data vault is off-network too. We need Dr. Lucitor to access it."

* * *

Star swam amongst the fronds, safely ensconced in a thick-shelled, fully-powered diving suit.

Tom cheered as Star deftly maneuvered past a long string of fronds. "Looking good, Star!"

Star whooped. "Take that, nature! Your freezing temperatures and bone-crushing pressures are no match for cold, hard titanium alloy!"

Marco was less enthusiastic, and stole yet another glance at his suit diagnostics.

She extended her manipulator, and felt the frond-like colonies of Tom's chemoautotroph through the virtual-reality gloves. It was stiff, but she couldn't quite make out the simulated texture. The ducted propellers whirred as she gently thrust forward for a closer look.

She looked down once more to see the endless string of fronds as it descended into the darkness.

"As you can see, Star, the fronds are quite firmly attached to the control string. The risk of product loss due to sedimentation of free-floating organisms is minimal. The fronds are reasonably strong, minimizing the material needed in the control string and maximizing the ratio of resource output to…"

Janna came in over the comm. "Hey guys! You're out early!"

Star replied first. "Hey Janna! Wanna come out here? It's a pretty awesome change from those claustrophobic corridors!"

Marco looked around the inside of his fishbowl visor, and stared down the inside of his suit. His undershirt stared back at him.

Nope. No wide open spaces here.

Jackie's voice rang through the comm. "Whoa, Marco! Didn't peg you for the diving type."

"I'm not."

"Pity. I scuba dive back home. The feeling of being surrounded by all that life… it's just amazing."

Janna killed the incipient conversation. "I'm actually here to speak to Dr. Lucitor. I need one of his associates to escort me into the Center's data vault. I need to see whether there's anything worth stealing."

"Of course."

Jackie decided to check on her Marines. "Mok! Huang! How are you two doing out there?"

"Doing fine, Captain! A little limited weapons-wise, though."

Jackie grinned savagely. "Use your fists!"

Tom came back on the comm. "Lieutenant Ordonia! My colleague Dr. Brian Anderson is waiting outside the data vault. He'll help you with anything you need."

* * *

The metal door opened, and the four of them – herself, Jackie, Dr. Anderson, and a security guard – stepped into the metal-walled data vault. Several terminals were occupied by people busily transferring data, and documents were piled high on desks, giving the room the atmosphere of a busy library rather than a bank vault.

"Here we are, Lieutenant. I hope you find what you're looking for."

Janna and Jackie sat down. The security guard typed in the visitor's password, passed biometrics, and stood back to watch the visitors from a respectful distance.

"Hey Janna! Found the manifest!"

Janna began skimming the headings.

Aeronomy. Astronomy. Astrophysics. Biology. Engineering. Geology. Hydrography. Oceanography. Physics.

Janna filtered out anything unclassified.

The engineering section seemed promising. Marine Engineering. Life support engineering. Bioengineering. Terraforming. Aerospace Engineering. She whistled. This was a big center, with lots of classified experimental engineering efforts.

But surely other research institutes were richer pickings than this dinky Europan Hydrosphere-oriented facility?

Perhaps the Euros and Japanese were interested in submarine design? Unlikely. The Japanese had the best marine engineers – and the best submarines - in the System. Their terrestrial wet Navy was huge and deadly, posing a significant threat to the sea lines of communication holding together the Joint Government's disparate territories.

The world faced by the Joint Government was no longer the world of the 20th century, when Soviet spies attempted time and time again to steal restricted JOINTGOV technology to quiet their noisy subs…

She went back to the pure and applied sciences, and checked a few random subheadings. Surprising amounts of data from Hydrography, Oceanography, and Physics had been classified.

So had data from Crustal Mechanics, Acoustic physics, Plume geophysics, and Hydrographic Mapping.

Janna's eyes opened wide. All of this stuff was of immense value in undersea warfare. "Jackie, get your Marines here. Lock this vault down!"

"You got it. So it _was_ the vault they were after. Why do you think they took Tom's handheld?"

"Dunno. I'm calling the local Security office to seal off this district. Whatever those Japanese spies want, they're not getting it today."

Jackie raised an eyebrow as she followed Janna out of the signal-blocking data vault. "You do remember the guy who could walk through walls, right?"

Janna snapped her fingers, and lifted her handheld to her ear. "Not a spy. A soldier. Probably special warfare."

"How did Japanese special forces end up here?"

They stepped past the door, and Jackie's comm screamed for attention. "…Captain Lynn, come in! Contact! Contact! Huang, behind you!"

The fire alarm rang, and all hell broke loose.


	10. Fires of the Deep

**Europa Oceanic Research Center**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

The Japanese soldier had not expected resistance from the scientists of the research installation, and was rudely surprised when the diving-suit-clad figure lunged at her instead of raising its arms in surrender.

"Mok, Huang! Get everyone out of the water! YAAAAH!"

Marco, propellers whirring, charged towards the incoming diving-suit-clad figure, and, in accordance with his microgravity hand-to-hand combat training, grappled the figure's bulbous metal arms.

As in microgravity, leverage is essential in underwater combat. Blows made without leverage or bracing cause individuals to move backwards. Underwater blows are further softened by the viscous, movement-resisting medium of water.

Behind him, Star did an inverted somersault, passing below her assailant to emerge behind the Mitsubishi hardsuit. Trails of carbon dioxide bubbles emanated from the bulbous, silkworm-like combatants as hydrocarbon fuel cells reacted methane and oxygen with alarming rapidity.

So comical were the bulky hardsuits that an uninformed observer might have mistaken the scene for a wrestling match between Michelin men.

Loud bangs – probably hardsuit-penetrating shaped charge grenades employed by the Marines – reverberated through the water. Mok came in over the comm. "Science team minus Dr. Butterfly secure. Proceeding to airlock."

Marco finally found purchase on the slippery metal hardsuit, and servos whirred as he closed his pincers tight around them. With contact made, he kicked the Mitsubishi suit dead center with powered legs. He barely made a dent in the thick metal of the soldier's chest.

The Japanese(?) soldier tried to raise her weapon – a bulky rocket-bullet gun. Marco kicked her again, this time in the visor. The visor failed, and Marco's metal-booted foot made purchase with something squishy before it was sucked into the suit by the immense pressure difference. Red fluid emerged from the breached visor.

"Go for the visors!"

Marco reached for the enemy's weapon, rendered just out of reach by his trapped foot.

"Spontaneous screwdriver stab!"

Star wrapped her legs around the enemy hardsuit's midsection, grabbed a screwdriver on her belt, and jammed it into the hardsuit's helmet. The visor held once, but Star's second powered-suit-augmented jab was successful, and the visor cracked. High-pressure water filled the suit, and knocked out the occupant before drowning her.

"Take that, you swine!"

"Stop jamming up the comm!"

Marco began to panic once he realized that he was being dragged down by the water-filled enemy suit.

"Star! A little help here! I'm sinking!"

Star grabbed the enemy's weapon, turned on her sonar, and began firing a steady stream of supercavitating rocket grenades at blips on her visor she guessed were enemy soldiers. Above her, a small troop of blips made their way to the nearest airlock.

Another line of blips was making their way to an airlock in the distance.

"People, we have more bad guys! Making their way into the research center!"

Enemy troops fired back. Star turned off her loud, attention-grabbing sonar, wished for luck, and dived after Marco.

Her blue-green comm laser began beeping insistently. "Suit 4 dropping out of range. Switch to sonar communications?" Star gulped. "No."

Turning on sonar communications would draw fire from every hostile in the vicinity. Star dove for Marco's last known position, and then directly down. Her suit beeped again. "Suits 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 out of range."

Star turned off her lights, and activated night vision. If Marco still had his lights on, Star would see him.

"Hang in there, Marco!"

The eternal darkness of the Europan hydrosphere engulfed her. Apart from the whir of propellers and the sound of her own breathing, Star's world was silent.

A faint light appeared in the distance, and Star dived towards it.

Star caught up with Marco, whose propellers (and emergency floatation balloons) were struggling valiantly against the dead weight. She broke off what was left of the enemy hardsuit's visor, and they both ascended to the icy ceiling above.

* * *

Janna drew her sidearm, and Jackie loaded her boxy assault rifle. Janna watched enviously as Jackie donned a helmet, snapped a chin assembly onto her collar, and pulled down an airtight visor.

"You think they'll use gas?"

"It's what I would do. Local security team may have masks."

Janna went over to the data vault security team, and acquired a gas mask. Fearful researchers packed their documents and fled the building.

"Do they have powered armor?"

Jackie shrugged. "Dunno. But I'm betting against it. Standard Marine exoskeletons don't fit under a hardsuit."

Janna checked her handheld. "Great. Militia's twenty minutes out. Police are five minutes out. Base security at the naval station is… preoccupied. Oh, good. Security has a bead on the hostiles. Feed to you. At least eighteen of 'em, no exoskeletons, no insignia, heavily armed. Darnit, they're killing the cameras."

Jackie linked the Security net into her helmet display, and yelled into her microphone. "Backintosh, Zheng! Spoiling attacks, and a fighting withdrawl to our position! Drop drones, and give me visual!"

An additional set of videos from golf-ball-sized micro-drones came appeared on Jackie's visor. Jackie tapped her TACPAD, and the data stream shrunk to manageable size. "Janna, find where they stashed their suits!"

"Star knows, but she's out of range! Checking cameras!"

Gunfire came in over the comm. "Darnit! Enemy drones! They know we're here! Fire in the hole!"

Jackie walked into the corridor, and began sticking small cylinders onto the walls. "Smart mines up! IFFs on, people!" She checked the map on her visor. "Sabrina, double around the corridor! You'll catch 'em in the flank!"

"Darnit. They're not on the cameras!"

More gunfire came in, and Jackie checked the map again. The (presumably) Japanese troops had chosen their insertion point well, and were a minute away from the vault. She checked Backintosh's helmet cam, where the enemy had regained the tactical initiative after taking losses. "That's it. Good attrition. Break off at the earliest opportunity, and assemble here. Last line of resistance, people!"

Janna looked quizzically at the Captain. Jackie shrugged. "What? I was a company commander before I signed on to command a platoon. Commanding a fireteam… eh…"

Gunfire echoed through the corridor, and Jackie scrambled back into the antechamber. Sergeant Backintosh and Corporal Zheng joined her, and moved to cover the corridor outside.

Under her gas mask, Janna's face lit up. "Star's alive! Hey Star! You reported in a column of hostiles, right?! Which airlock?!"

"Uhh… Star checked her visor display, which overlaid a map of nearby airlocks. Airlock 18c!"

"Mok! Huang! Get moving to airlock 18c! The hostiles have their diving suits stashed there!"

Once the Japanese commander realized that his exfiltration option was under attack, he (or she) would be forced to send reinforcements to defend it, taking pressure off the data vault. Jackie was also banking on the sudden threat to their means of escape harming enemy morale.

A drone buzzed into the corridor, and Jackie raised her rifle. The rifle fired the moment the drone buzzed into the line-of-fire. Another drone entered the corridor, and Jackie repeated the shot.

Janna looked impressed. "Nice shot."

Jackie grimaced, and pointed at the sight. "Smart rifle."

Rolling smart grenades, accompanied by a few dozen empty coke cans, began rolling down the hallway. Jackie took aim, and her rifle began firing – at both the decoys and grenades. "Back! Back! Back!"

They ducked behind the customer service desk, and the grenades detonated at the threshold, filling the entire hallway with smoke, shrapnel, and concussive blast.

Jackie ran headlong to the door, and heard a pair of satisfying thumps as her smart mines did their work. She bounced a pair of smart grenades through the door. Two more explosions rang through the antechamber. Backintosh fired a few bursts of fire into the smoke-filled corridor, and the return fire slackened.

A smart grenade detonated just beyond the threshold, and speared Backintosh with a lance of molten copper. Backintosh screamed, and the communications system automatically cut her off. Janna grabbed a medpack, and began removing Backintosh's armor.

"Mok, Huang, get there now! We need the pressure off us, quick!"

Mok's voice was frantic. "We're pinned down!"

Janna chuckled as Zheng shot down another drone. "You know, I just realized why they wanted Dr. Lucitor's handheld."

Jackie tossed another grenade into the corridor. "Why?"

Janna applied pressure to the remains of Backintosh's arm. "They wanted to know when we would be here."

"Gas! Gas! Gas!"

A grenade landed outside the antechamber, and began spewing billowing clouds gas. Janna suddenly felt an overwhelming need to scratch as her skin screamed for attention.

A pair of security guards dropped their weapons, and began desperately scratching their arms and neck.

"Itching gas! If you don't have a suit, fall back!"

Janna cursed, dragged Backintosh into the data vault, and sealed the door. Collapsing to the ground next to Backintosh, she desperately fought the urge to drop the gauze as her body burned.

* * *

Marco stopped crawling along the cold, icy ceiling, and opened a comm channel.

"Star! What are we doing?!"

"You heard Captain Thomas! Airlock 18c! Right over there!" Star pointed in the general direction of the dot on her visor display.

"I can't even see the thing!"

"So? Whoever's guarding the place won't see us either."

"We could at least tell Mok and Huang that we're going in! What if they shoot us by mistake!"

"Oh, yeah. Didn't think of that. Silly me." She went on the comm. "Hey Mok, Huang! We're going into 18c from the outside! We grabbed a gun off a dead guy! Didn't take the ammunition, though."

"We're taking fire, Dr. Butterfly. Your help is appreciated. But have Commander Diaz take the lead."

"What!"

They arrived at airlock 18c. The maintenance airlock, lit by dim floodlights, protruded down from the icy ceiling like a smoke detector. Two diving-suit clad hostiles guarded the entrance.

Star took aim at the more distant hostile, and opened fire. One round ran true, and an odd thump rang through the water as water rushed into the breached suit. Star opened fire at the nearer hostile, who took cover behind the airlock.

Marco saw his chance, and charged the airlock, Star on his tail. He dashed around the airlock, and caught up with the hostile. Marco grabbed the enemy soldier's gun, and pushed him against the ceiling as his propellers whirred.

Star broke the glass, and pulled down on the emergency handle with her pincer, flooding the lock.

Marco strained against the enemy soldier. The Mitsubishi hardsuit, designed for military use, had better servomotors, and the enemy solider was slowly pushing his weapon into position to shoot Marco. He was close enough to the enemy that he could see the man's Japanese visor display – clear as bioluminescent fish in the dimly-floodlit ocean, especially with night vision optics…

Marco turned on his helmet lights, dodged left, and smashed a pincer into the enemy's visor. Momentarily distracted by the eye protection software, the enemy did not dodge in time, and the visor failed, sucking Marco's hand into a dead suit. Marco closed his pincer, and withdrew his hand.

"Hey, Marco! We're in!"

* * *

The Japanese Petty Officer ran to the door of the airlock antechamber, assault rifle drawn. Much to his surprise, he saw no sign of an assault force. No Marines dismounting from their diving suits, no camera drones, nothing.

He gingerly walked into the antechamber, his boots ringing on the wet steel grill. Neat rows of grey Japanese diving suits, their backpack-mounted hatches open, stood opposite a similar row of four yellow civilian suits with similarly open backpacks.

Weapon braced, the soldier marched over to the closed airlock door and looked through the thick porthole.

The wet floor of the airlock was the last thing he saw before a supposedly empty yellow diving suit slammed a shiny metal pincer into the back of his head.

* * *

"Sneaky statue smash! Oh yeah!"

Marco groaned as he clambered out of the diving suit. "I can't believe he fell for that."

Star hopped out of her suit and picked up the enemy's carbine. "Nobody can resist my sneaky statue smash!"

"Star, they only do that in movies."

"Do what?" Star shot the prone body in the head.

Marco moved to the door. "Announce the move before executing it." He turned to check on Star, and nearly threw up at the sight of the cadaver, which Star was busy stripping.

They poked their heads around the corner. An enemy soldier rushed their position. Star opened fire, and the woman ducked out of the corridor, suppressed.

"Marco, open the airlock door and push everything into the airlock."

"What?"

"We can't hold this airlock. Once reinforcements arrive, they'll overwhelm us. We put everything into the airlock, get in the airlock, flush the lock, and push everything into the ocean."

Marco nodded, opened the inner airlock door, and immediately went to work. He accidentally got an eyeful of the cadaver's head as he dragged yet another hardsuit into the airlock, and fought back the urge to hurl.

"Star… how can you stand this?"

Shots rang out in the hallway. "I was trained by the best mercenaries in the system, Marco! I practiced on live pigs!"

Marco's jaw dropped. Pigs weren't cheap on Earth, and were valuable off it. "That must have cost a fortune! And it's inhumane!"

More shots rang out in the hallway. "Well, duh, and duh again, Marco! And speaking of inhumane, you shoot lasers that broil people alive, big metal darts that blast people into goo, and particle beams that give people radiation poisoning! That last one is a pretty nasty way to go!"

"That's different! I…"

"…don't see it up close. It's exactly the same. It's war! It's horrible, bloody, and completely necessary."

Marco dragged the last hardsuit into the airlock, jumped into his own suit, and closed the backpack. "Done! Let's get out of here!"

Star followed suit, and the airlock door closed just as a Japanese soldier ran into the room.

The airlock rapidly filled with water, and the outer door opened. As the Japanese soldier looked on furiously, Star jammed a hardsuit under the outer door, which the Japanese soldier nevertheless tried to close.

Star and Marco casually rolled thirty hardsuits into the Europan hydrosphere, gave the Japanese soldier a wave, and followed the suits out the door before yanking away the door-jamming hardsuit.

Marco chuckled as he confirmed that the hardsuits were sinking. "Did you see the look on his face?!"

"Oh, yeah. It was hilarious. But now they're stuck here."

"And?"

"Well, the Japanese aren't big on the whole "surrendering" thing. Militia's going to have a tough time cleaning 'em out."

* * *

 _In the late 70s, the Soviet Union developed very high-speed "supercavitating" rocket-propelled torpedoes; that is, they created a bubble of air between themselves and the water around them to minimize water resistance._

 _The most famous among these weapons is the Shkval, which could travel at nearly 400km/h._


	11. Cleanup

**Iceberg Valley City Morgue**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

Jackie sighed as she zipped up Sergeant Mok's body bag, and slid it into a freezer. Private Huang's body bag lay beside it, awaiting its turn. She chuckled grimly as the freezer display changed to white, indicating that the body within was a dead cadaver instead of a live passenger.

Contrary to the expectations of many science-fiction authors, shipping frozen corpses back to Earth for burial had proven feasible and inexpensive, especially in a world where people-freezer technology was used extensively to transport personnel and livestock across the solar system.

Jackie knew that this would only hold true as long as the conflict simmered. If the warm war turned hot, the huge number of cadavers produced would most likely be laid to rest in the traditional spacer manner: fed into the recycling system.

In fact, Private Huang's cadaver, bound for Earth's Moon, would probably end up in a wet incinerator very similar to the one in the next room.

Mok and Huang had been sandwiched between the hapless defenders of the irrelevant airlock and the reinforcements deployed by the Japanese commander. Unable to extricate themselves from their position, and unconvinced that the doomed Japanese forces would honor a surrender, they had been overrun.

As hoped, the diversion of forces had allowed Jackie to hold the vault antechamber long enough for the police and militia to arrive. The close-quarters fighting that ensued had been long, bloody, and repetitive, as the trapped Japanese soldiers fought tenaciously for every corridor, room, and doorway.

Jackie looked at the dozen or so body bags that surrounded her, and began to leave.

She ran right into Star. They stopped, and surveyed the black body bags together. Jackie spoke first.

"It's not your fault, Star."

"What?"

"Marco told me that you were worried about the Japanese fighting to the end after you dunked their gear. It couldn't have turned out differently, and we did the right thing. When you dumped their gear into the ocean, we were hanging on by our fingernails. The odds were fair that they'd overrun the data vault, grab what they needed, and get out. Objective comes first."

"Oh. Did we get any prisoners?"

"Janna wheeled 'em off to some black site or another. Their uniforms had no insignia, so Security's holding 'em as spies."

"Did we get their sub?"

"No. It made a clean getaway. The Japanese Maritime Defense Force builds 'em better than we do, apparently."

Star nodded.

Jackie looked concerned. "So, you skateboard?"

Star shook her head. Jackie smiled. "I'm going skateboarding later. You wanna give it a shot?"

Star nodded. Jackie wrapped her arm around Star. "Come on. There's a train coming in five minutes."

* * *

 **Iceberg Valley Whitecap Park**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

Whitecap Park had been built in a gargantuan cavern, carved from the ice by thermonuclear explosives and illuminated with huge electric lamps. Amidst the botanical gardens, grassy lawns, lotus-filled lakes, and bamboo forests (all harvestable) were playgrounds, kiosks, decorative structures, and a skate park.

If it were not for the tacky sky-blue insulation on the icy ceiling sixty stories above her, Janna could have mistaken the place for a park on Earth.

Janna walked up to Marco. Dressed in a hooded jacket and jeans, he was almost unrecognizable as a Space Force officer. He didn't notice her, and Janna followed his gaze from to the big, u-shaped half-pipe.

On the half-pipe, Jackie soared up one ramp, flew eight metes – nearly three stories - into the air, hung there, and descended back onto the half-pipe.

Janna whistled. Low gravity sports rule. "Isn't that dangerous?"

Marco shook his head. "Seriously, Janna? You're a commissioned officer of the Joint Government Space Force. You took physics!"

Janna groaned, and facepalmed. "Right. Kinetic energy gets turned to gravitational potential energy going up, vice versa coming down. Conservation of energy means Jackie comes down at nearly the same speed as she did going up, work done against air resistance makes the difference. But since her speed on the bottom of the half-pipe is the same as her speed on a half-pipe on Earth, she's completely okay. The really high ascent might make it easier to miss the half-pipe on the way down, though."

Marco nodded. "Pretty much."

Janna chuckled. "I ran a background check on Dr. Lucitor."

Marco nearly jumped out of his skin, and Janna laughed. "Relax. I knew you were jumpy about the guy, so I ran a check. The guy's cleaned up his problem. No complaints or incidents at work for the last three years."

Marco regained his composure. "The abuse of the powers vested in you is highly unethical. And Star isn't staying long."

Janna patted Marco's shoulder. "She could've been. I'm looking out for a friend, Marco. Just like you."

Janna walked over to talk to Jackie. Marco shrugged, and walked over to the kiosk to buy a drink.

* * *

 _Author's note: This author does not understand how skateboarding works. Presumably, there is more kicking the ground involved in off-world skateboarding to build up speed on the flat bit of the half-pipe, as merely dropping off the ledge of a normal-sized half pipe will not give you enough speed to soar beyond the ledge on the other side for conservation of energy reasons. Or maybe they build bigger half-pipes on Europa. Feel free to correct this author on this matter._

* * *

 **Iceberg Valley Naval Base**

 **Iceberg Valley, Europa**

"You're kidding me. This is what you wanted my Marines for?"

"Jackie, shush. You're ruining our grand entrance." Janna straightened her collar, checked her epaulets, and continued marching through the insulated corridor, a squad of rifle-toting, battledress-clad Marines in tow.

The troupe passed by rows of cubicles, drawing stares, gasps, and anxious whispers from the servicemen and women within. Jackie, feeling woefully out of place, blushed slightly with every distracted turn of the head and each curious rise from a VR immersion chair.

The corridor ended in a reinforced metal door. Janna showed her handheld to the marine on guard duty, and he duly opened it.

Janna, her eyes on the woman behind the metal desk, strode into the plush, well-decorated office. The Marines hurriedly fanned out around the room, and stood to attention, weapons at the ready. Jackie nodded, and Janna began to speak.

"Rear Admiral Charmaine Fong, I'm Lieutenant Janna Ordonia, Space Force. I'm here to inform you that Navy Fleet Forces Command has requested you return to Earth immediately to oversee training of the next generation of extraterrestrial submariners."

Janna handed over the watermarked bamboo paper with the Admiral's orders.

The Admiral looked at the orders, frowned, and then turned back to Janna. "Inform Fleet Forces Command that the recent incursion here indicates that our naval forces on Europa are at severe risk. A seasoned commander is essential at the current time. I would recommend that my replacement be delayed."

Janna shook her head. "The orders are not subject to review. You are to return to Earth immediately."

The Admiral stood. "If you swap me out now, fleet efficiency will suffer for months! At least give me a month or two to break my successor in!"

Janna shook her head again. "My orders are to bring you directly to dock sixteen, where a Space Force troop transport will ferry you back to Earth."

The Admiral looked at the Marines, and at Janna's Security badge. "Is this whole show because that Japanese submarine got past our sonar nets? I've been arguing for reinforcements, increased tech budgets, and settler conscription for years! The success of the Japanese incursion was a result of limitations in the sonar technology we had available, not because of the quality of our personnel!"

Janna sighed. "Look, Admiral. I'm just the messenger. But the buzz I caught was that some admirals back on Earth thought you and your subs were a little too aggressive with the Japanese and Euros. It makes good tactical and strategic sense to probe their capabilities, but they want you to hold back for geostrategic reasons. The recent incident with the Japanese just hit home that we're not up for a war on Europa… yet. They just want you to go to Earth and train extra submariners to improve our future position here. If things get hairy in the future… they might even send you back here."

The Admiral glanced at Jackie's carbine, sighed, and began collecting papers from her desk. "Give me a few hours to pack."

Janna smiled. "Feel free to leave your stuff in a locker. I have a feeling you'll be coming back soon."

The Admiral grabbed her handheld, and left the room. Jackie crossed her arms, doffed her helmet, and leaned back on the wall. "We're seriously packing in Admiral Fong? Scuttlebutt has it that she's quite popular down here."

Janna frowned, and joined Jackie on the wall. The marine next to her rolled his eyes at the officers, and stood a little straighter. "I told her the truth. We're at war. We can't afford to lose a good commander, but we can't afford to have a loose cannon running around either."

Jackie tilted her head, and extended her hand. "Someone with a spine, you mean." She waved her arm across her squad of armed marines. "Is all this really necessary? It's not like the Admiral would lead a mutiny, or that anyone would follow her if she did."

Janna put her hand to her chin. "How sure are you of that? Historically, the generals guarding the frontiers of China tend to revolt when the central government is weak, hastening the collapse of dynasty after dynasty. And every time the country breaks apart, between a fifth and two-thirds of the population die." Janna put on her creepy voice. "With automatic rifles, biological weapons, and nukes… we can totally beat those numbers."

Jackie shrugged noncommittally.

Janna smiled. "I'm kidding, Jackie. Things are a long way from that point. But think about it. If Earth had sent over a video message as usual, the Admiral or her subordinates would probably have found a way to lose the file, drag their feet, or send long, argumentative emails back. This would have continued until Admiral Fong could have instilled in her designated successor sufficient… gall to continue her chosen policies."

Jackie shrugged again. Janna continued.

"Basically, we're putting on this show for the desk jockeys out there. They see us march in with marines and march out with the Admiral, the whole thing goes on the grapevine, and everyone gets a reminder that the central government is still boss out here."

Jackie smirked. "You do realize that's your entire job description."

Admiral Fong came back into the room, empty duffel in hand, causing Janna and Jackie to scramble to attention. The Admiral's voice was sullen. "You know, Fleet Forces Command could have just sent me an email."

Janna shrugged. "They wanted to impress on you the urgency of your new assignment. Where may I find your flotilla's Security officer? I also have orders for him."

Admiral Fong frowned. "Captain Charles Ocampo. Office next door."

Janna walked out the door, leaving the Marines with the Admiral.

* * *

 _This concludes the second episode of Space Unicorn. To avoid timeline sequence issues (i.e. an adventure on Mercury seemingly taking place immediately after a romp on Uranus), future episodes of the Butterfly Effect series may be written under separate titles. It is unfortunately not logical for JGSS Invisible Pink Unicorn to jump around the Outer System willy-nilly – interplanetary trips, even with torch drives, take weeks in the Inner System and months in the Outer System, so nearby locations will tend to be visited in sequence._


End file.
